Dr Muhammad Khan
WHEREAS, the masses are the baseline (centre of gravity) for any nation state, the military acts as its tool to protect geographical frontiers of the state. The international system of the nation states is based on anarchy without a supra-national authority. In this highly anarchical world, each state has to struggle for maintaining its survival, sovereignty and national integrity. The nation states maintain their defence forces for their security. It takes decades to form the defence forces, train them, make them battle harden and develop a long-term strategy for ensuring security of the state. Starting from few military units at the time of independence, today the defence forces of Pakistan are numbered among the top-most militaries of the world.
The professionalism, dedication and devotion of the Pakistani military is indeed unparalleled. Besides these the ideological strength of the military has further reinforced and accentuated its professionalism and devotion. Through its professionalism, dedication and national spirit, the military has combated and defeated a war which was deliberately thrust upon Pakistan as an international conspiracy to ruin the state of Pakistan. The global war on terror thrust upon Pakistan had regional rivals and international forces behind to devastate Pakistan. It was not an easy war, since spying networks of regional countries and global powers were fully supporting, financing and harbouring the terrorist outfits against Pakistan.
The Pakistani military has timely anticipated the intents of regional and international powers which they enacted on Pakistan through their spying networks. In defeating the international conspiracies, the defence forces of Pakistan have played incomparable role in last two decades. The enemies of Pakistan have indeed, planned for Pakistani state a future like; Libya, Iraq and Syria. Global conspiracies were aimed at creating internal dissection among the people and between defence forces and the masses on various pretexts. Creation of TTP, various sub-nationalist groups and ethnic and factional divides were all aimed at creating a chaos within Pakistan and a civil war like situation. All was defeated by the defence forces and intelligence apparatus of Pakistan while the masses stood strongly behind them like an iron wall.
Despite defeating the regional and internationally backed terrorist network, the rival powers have not given up. They are still continuing their efforts with new strategies to destabilize and ultimately create a chaos in the state and society of Pakistan. The rival powers are trying to exploit and weaken Pakistan through all means. Economic problems are one factor, which is being exploited through forums like FATF and IMF. FATF is a being used against Pakistan for the economic exploitation of the state. It is a powerful tool at the hands of exploitative global forces with bad economic managers at home. However, the most dangerous aspect is creating and supporting organizations which further create abhorrence against the state institutions like defence forces and the intelligence agencies of Pakistan. This indeed is the height of frustration, which the conspiring regional and international forces are employing as an instrument against the state institutions.
Some of the political and relegio-politico parties and their juvenile leadership are deliberately pointing fingers towards institution of Army and ISI. Indeed, such acts are very dangerous since these acts will provide an opportunity to international forces to exploit Pakistani security institutions. Defamation of the military institutions and organizations of intelligence is serious act. As a nation there is a need to understand that, the international state(s) system is based on power politics, ‘political action by a state intended to increase its own power and influence, while weakening the opponent’s power and influence. A nuclear Pakistan with strong and professional defence forces is the real target of India and Afghanistan at regional level and US and West at the international level.
To achieve their objective these forces have already launch their political and diplomatic warfare against Pakistan. In this political rivalry, the target areas of the opponent state are; government, military, general population and economy. This all is achieved through a variety of techniques like; propaganda and psychological operations, diplomatic coercions at international level and through psychological warfare where non-state actors are best utilized. For past one decade, the hostile forces like India, US and NDS of Afghanistan have been using the Afghan soil to train, equipped, finance and harbour these sub nationalists of Balochistan and TTP terrorists against Pakistan. Afghan soil is still being used by NDS and RAW for uniting the terrorist organizations against Pakistan.
The geopolitical location of Pakistan makes it an attractive place for the major powers and regional rivals. These powers intend to exploit the geopolitics of Pakistan for their own strategic goals. The defence forces of Pakistan are a big hurdle for these forces to implement their nefarious designs. The on-going defamation campaign against defence forces of Pakistan is a deliberate attempt to destabilise the state of Pakistan. The campaign also aims at creating a gap between masses and the defence forces. Therefore, there is a need to understand the real motives of the on-going conspiracies against institutions of the national security of Pakistan.
— The writer is Professor of Politics and IR at International Islamic University, Islamabad.
